The Women’s Movement in Iran: Women at the Crossroads of Secularisation and Islamization

The paper thus outlines the social and political conditions that have
led not only to the development of secular feminist perspectives in Iran, but to
the emergence of woman-centred Islamists and their strategies which aim, thus
far with considerable success, to fundamentally challenge conventional gender
visions often presented as "Islamic." This analysis of the gender debates in
Iran, and by extension elsewhere in the Muslim world, reiterates that Islam,
particularly as a political ideology, is far from static and unchanging; it is a
dynamic and evolving ideological force that is being constructed and
reconstructed in the hands of diverse political clergy and more recently by
Islamist feminists and the wider society.